Columbus, in spite of his many faults, was a man of character. His devout Catholicism informed his treatment of his fellow sailors, whom he enjoined in shipwide prayer every half-hour on the long journey from Spain to the New World. Even Bartolomé de las Casas, the “Defender and Apostle to the Indians” whose lurid, if hyperbolic, treatises on the treatment of Native peoples made him famous, spoke favorably of Columbus and his treatment of indigenous people. Columbus famously adopted a Native American boy and urged his fellow voyagers to exercise restraint and mercy toward the Natives, even, for instance, after they had burned down an entire Spanish settlement and killed all of the Spaniards in the area.
Contrary to the simplistic picture painted by academics, the indigenous cultures Columbus encountered were as assorted as those of any other peoples in history. While it might be true that some such cultures fit the nomadic, tranquil image pushed by the revisionists, not even close to all of them did. Which leads to an inevitable follow-up to those who would eliminate Columbus Day in favor of “Indigenous People’s Day”: Which “indigenous people” do you have in mind? Is it the Kalinago people, who ate roasted human flesh, with a particular affinity for the remains of babies and fetuses? Is it the Aztecs, who killed an estimated 84,000 people in four days in their consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan?